Good morning, RVA! It's 45 °F, and today us we’ve got some really delightful highs in the 70s ahead of us. You should probably expect a little less sunshine, but there’s still every reason in the world to go outside during lunch and spend a bit of time breathing in the fresh air. Tomorrow, temperatures drop a full 10 degrees, and, next week, we’ve got some lows that start with a two. Real, actual fall weather returns just in time for Thanksgiving!
Water cooler
VPM’s Lyndon German reports from Henrico’s State of the County address, which took place yesterday. They are, of course, biased, but, with sports tourism and big economic development projects kicking off, the County definitely thinks its current state is pretty darn good. The full presentation slides haven’t yet been posted to the County’s website, but I’m gonna guess they’ll exist right here at some point later today.
Via /r/rva, the USDA has updated their Plant Hardiness Zone Map, and Richmond now sits squarely in 7b. Check out how our local climate has warmed over the last 30 years: 1990’s map had Central Virginia entirely in the 7a zone, while 2012’s map had us split between 7a and 7b. I’m not enough of a plant wizard to know how the shift to 7b impacts what I should plunk down in my yard, but the changes in this map are another direct, local, and measurable impact of climate change on our lives.
Megan Marconyak writing for the Richmond Times-Dispatch has a preview of Fanboy, a hip new cocktail bar in the Fan. I think I’m past (or not yet arrived at?) the Hip New Cocktail Bar point in my life, but dang do the photos of this place look neat. I bet their bathroom aesthetics are just incredible.
RVAHub’s Richard Hayes hit up the media preview of GardenFest of Lights at the Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden and snapped a bunch of really great pictures. If you want to check it out for yourself, and by the looks of it you should, you’ll need to buy tickets online beforehand. The annual holiday light show opens this coming Monday and runs through January 7th—so you’ve got plenty of time to cram it in to your busy holiday calendar.
This week, Elon Musk affirmed a bunch of anti-Semitic conspiracy theory garbage on Twitter and immediately sent another wave of folks (and advertisers) running for the platform’s doors. If, for some reason, you’re still using Twitter—either reading it or posting on it—you should stop. We’re in the midst of a transition from one age of social media to another, and that’s exciting! It means you’ve got lots of better options for where to share your very important cat photos, critical questions about lunch, and fascinating longread links. You can, of course, join Threads—the Twitter clone owned and operated by Instagram, which itself is owned and operated by the (for now) less-bad social media billionaire. You could also join Mastodon, a federated social media network (I run a Richmond-centric server at rva.fyi if you’d like a place to call home). Or, heck, join both and see how it goes. Just don’t stay on Twitter. It’s OK to leave, and I’ve got first-hand experience that says you probably won’t even miss it!
This morning's longread
This school tried to keep kids safe. Then graduation ended in gunfire.
The Washington Post spent a year at Huguenot High School learning about Richmond Public Schools’ strategies to prevent gun violence and deal with the trauma left in its wake. If you’d rather listen, they’ve also put together a version as a two-part podcast. Warning: You should expect descriptions of gun violence and trauma in these stories.
It’s her job to do this: After a student dies, she follows in their footsteps, lacing up sneakers, pursuing their class schedule, comforting their friends and directing people to mental health services as needed. That day, she had left her official Richmond badge at home and dressed as a student — to put high-schoolers at ease. The Richmond district created Short’s role, which looks nothing like what schools have traditionally done, as part of a step-by-step, intricate response officials here have developed to handle an increasingly unmanageable load of pain, violence and trauma. Virginia’s capital is facing an epidemic of youth gun violence. In the past three years, almost 30 Richmond students died in gunfire, according to the school system. The city’s rate of young people killed by guns spiked to three times the national average in 2017. In 2022 alone, there were 22 children under 18 injured by gunfire and five shot to death, according to Richmond police.
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Picture of the Day
An unedited photo of the pool at the Calhoun Center in Gilpin Court.
